I sometimes like to skip steps when I’m responding to emails on my Google smart-phone. So much that I don’t even bother hitting “Reply” when I want to reply and I just start typing like it’s a text message. I mean, it’s SUPPOSED to be a smart phone, right? Well, I guess my expectations are too high for even a smart-phone. In my rush to reply to an important email, I started typing “I am…” and then…my email disappeared. I freaked out for a split second but remembered something I mentioned before in another post… PANIC NEVER DOES ANYONE OR ANYTHING ANY GOOD. So I didn’t. I went to my ALL MAIL and found my email conversation and noticed that it now had the label of “Muted” on it.

How did that happen? And better yet, how do I Un-Mute it?

Apparently to MUTE an email conversation in Gmail it is something as easy as pressing the letter “M” on your keyboard while reading the email. How to REMOVE the MUTE label is not so intuitive.

I looked through my menu…looked through my settings…no “un-mute” command anywhere. I went to my Gmail mailbox online and did not find any “un-mute” button or setting anywhere there either.

Now that’s annoying.

So why would anyone want to mute a conversation anyway? Muting is particularly helpful if you see a long email discussion happening on a topic that you know you’ll want to reference at some point in the future, but isn’t important to you right now. A quick search with Gmail’s powerful search tools, and you’ll have the entire neatly archived, without it cluttering up your inbox!

Let’s first understand how to actually MUTE a gmail email conversation:

1. Open up the email you wish to Mute.
2. If you are on a browser checking webmail, click on More Actions and choose Mute.
3. If you are on an android smart phone with the built-in gmail Inbox interface, just press the letter M.
4. The email conversation should now have disappeared from your Inbox.

See how EASY it is to make your emails disappear from your phone? (Or maybe I’m just a smart-phone klutz…most likely the latter)

Now, this is how you un-intuitively UN-MUTE your email conversation:

1. Go All Mail on either your webmail or android smart-phone. (My Google phone menu option is View Labels)
2. If you are in webmail, open the muted conversation and then you will see a button on top called Move to Inbox. Yeah, click that one.
3. If you are in your smart-phone, you will open the muted conversation and go to Labels or Change labels from the menu option. Check off the Inbox label to send it back to the Inbox.
4. Go back to your inbox and your muted email will have been restored.

Just thought I’d share in case somebody freaks out like I did. (I didn’t freak out that long, ok, but it was enough for me to warrant this post.)

Good Luck!

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